Wellmans Community :: essays research papers

In the article, The Community Question Re-Evaluated, the write Barry Wellman suggests that the change in nature of community is inevitable. Many people argon stressful about changes their communities are going through such as loneliness, alienation leading to a war of all against all. They would often differentiate their modern times community to of their pre-industrial predecessors. However, inhabitants of contemporaneous societies should have less to disquiet about than their ancestors with respect to the basics of human life. Instead comparing contemporary crime and political violence rates with the past, we should seek to gain deeper understand of how our community changes- how the big bodily structure of social systems reciprocally affects the small-scale structure and contents of interpersonal relations within them. The social changes in large-scale systems are suggested to be associated with the Industrial Revolution which affected the structure and trading operation s of the community. Social commentators suggested that large-scales faced the impacts of industrialization, capitalism, imperialism, bureaucratization and technological developments which thusly dripped down onto the interpersonal relations. They celebrated that the large-scale reorganization of production has created new opportunities for community relations. For example, industrialization had trim poverty and that working-class home ownership would heighten neighborhood common bonds. Although the analyses are well debatable, Wellman believes that community may have changed in response to the pressure, opportunities and constraints of large-scale forces. The complexities in the discovery of past and present communities led analysts to cognise that the term community, often demonstrated in a neighborhood, is not limit to neighborhoods. By 1970s, analysts had expanded the definition of community beyond the boundaries of neighborhood and affinity solidarity and argued that the essence of community was its social structure and not its spatial structure. They then began to treat community as personal community and defined as a network of significant, informal community ties. The transmutation of community into social network has helped the persistence of communities even when the neighborhood traces are faint.